


the grown-ups

by arbitrarily



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Future Fic, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Post-Series, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-03-31 04:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3964594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Grandma Pauline likes to say, "You take after your father," which Sally knows is just another way of saying: you've got the devil in you. She doesn't think she's wrong.</i>
</p>
<p>Sally and the summer of 1974: she is both her father's and her mother's daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the grown-ups

**Author's Note:**

> This is the ultimate in dirty, bad, "you need the infant baby Jesus to save your soul" wrong, and for that I apologize. 
> 
> Spoilers through the series finale.

 

 

 

“There wasn’t much to know. Now there’s less.”  
MEGAN ABBOTT

  

“You like trouble, don’t you.”  
MAD MEN

 

 

 

 

 

Sally turns in her last paper of the semester. She double-checks that her name is printed on the front page, and then – gone, finished, the last paper of the semester.

She walks back to her dorm. Sally is not the sort to say hello to people on campus, but everyone else smiles at her when she passes, like they think they know her or like they think they’d like to know her. She is ready to leave this all behind, if only for the summer.

The only thing left in her dorm is her roommate Brenda’s record player, though no sign of Brenda herself. 

“Well, goodbye, then,” Sally says to the empty room.

She tramps down the stairs, heavy suitcase banging at her legs. The rest of her stuff is already packed into Patty’s car. She met Patty her freshman year, that first weekend, when it seemed every girl in that dorm had stumbled blindly into one another in search of a friend. Sally found Patty, for whatever that was worth. 

In the car, Patty passes Sally a small bottle of lemon schnapps that tastes like disinfectant and a pack of cigarettes, a book of matches – PETEY + ALICE 1971 _Atlantic City_ , with wedding bells embossed in gold.  

“Ready to make tracks?” Patty says, a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth. 

Sally rolls the window down, bats long strands of her hair out of her face. “Let’s hit it,” she says. 

It’s 1974. Sally is twenty years old. She just finished her sophomore year. She wrote her final paper on Kate Chopin’s _The Awakening_. She is learning, if anything, the virtue of the direct and obvious approach. She is learning that is often the only play worth making. 

The first match she lights is a bum; the spark won’t take. She tears another loose, her thumb covering Petey and Alice’s names as she strikes it. She inhales, exhales on a sigh. 

By the time they reach Rye, Sally will have smoked four cigarettes in a row.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty died in 1971, the day before Valentine’s Day. Henry got the kids. 

Sally chose to go to Sarah Lawrence. It’s roughly thirty minutes from Rye. She could’ve gone elsewhere, she could’ve applied elsewhere, but, well, there would be places to go and farther distances to travel later. Later, like when Bobby graduated and then Gene graduated. That kind of later. She doesn’t say things like this out loud anymore, not in front of Henry and never to Don. Henry gets this tight, sad look to his face when she talks about the boys, about time and about distance, when she uses phrases like, “only thirty minutes, traffic depending,” and “don’t worry about it, I’ll be home that weekend anyway.” He gets that look, as if all this is his fault.

Sally had convinced Betty. That’s Sally’s view of the situation; Henry had adopted the uncharacteristic role of silent but sturdy sentry towards the end. If he had fought for them, he had done it when Sally wasn’t around. 

“They need a woman,” Betty had said to Sally.

“They would have me.”

“They need a mother.”

“Well, that’s no longer an option, is it,” Sally had said, as if all this was Betty’s fault. 

Sally had only spoken to Henry of it once. “I don’t wish to defy her wishes,” she had said, like she was before a congressional committee and not at their kitchen table, “but this is our home.”

In time, Betty agreed. Sally will never know why, but Betty agreed.

Maybe she saw what Sally saw. Henry had always been good with the boys. And while he had always been good with the boys, he never knew how to behave as a father to her. Or maybe that was on her end: she never knew how to see him as a father.

She already had Don. She didn’t need another father to fail her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don moved back to New York before Betty died. He had an apartment in the city and a girlfriend he had brought back from California. She wore loose gauzy fabrics and her hair was long and she was nothing like Betty and she was nothing like Megan, and if you asked her, she would say she is nothing like anyone and neither are you, each and every soul unique and one’s own. Sally couldn’t stand her. 

Don stayed in the city and Betty died and in 1973 Don went back to California. When he lived in the city, the boys would see him every other weekend, Sally sometimes, too. With Don, it was all just as it had always been. And as it had always been: he left. 

Before he left, he sat down with Sally at the table in his apartment. Everything he owned was packed in boxes; he did not own much. Don poured two glasses of whiskey and he pushed one towards her. She stared at it, and then took too big of a swallow. The whiskey burned and she struggled not to cough.

“What?” she had said when the glass was empty, her voice weak and croaking. “Is that supposed to make me feel better or something?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The house in Rye doesn’t change. It’s as imposing as when they had first moved in. Grandma Pauline likes to talk about hiring redecorators for the place, as if her brief stay with them after Betty’s death has earned her a say in interior design. It hasn’t, and the house doesn’t change. 

Sally finds the boys sprawled in front of the television. 

“Hey, lazybones,” Sally calls to them. “Help me with this stuff.”

Neither Bobby nor Gene moves until she shouts, “Hey!” Bobby towers over her, all long limbs and wide shoulders, skinny, the rest of him having yet to catch up. He lifts her bags easily, grumbling as he ascends the stairs two at a time. Gene is small for his age and quiet, always that flat, watchful look to him, as if nothing gets past him. She reaches, cards a hand through his light hair, and he jerks away from her. 

“Nice to see you, too,” she says and he grins without showing teeth. He flops back down on his stomach in front of the TV.  

“You guys home alone?” she asks Gene. He barely glances back at her, shaking his head. 

“Henry’s working,” he says after a beat, eyes glued to the screen.

She nods. She wanders deeper into the house. She raps a hand against the wood doorframe to his study.

Henry looks up at her from his desk, a quick beat of surprise. The house doesn’t change, and neither does Henry. He looks the same, she thinks, as when he first moved into the house in Ossining with them. He is a constant, in a way.

“Sally,” he says.

“Henry.”

He looks at his watch, and then back at her. He rises, gives her a loose hug, no body heat exchanged, and a peck on the cheek. 

“Glad you’re home,” he says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before she died, Bobby had said to Henry, “You know, I always thought you’d die first.” 

Henry didn’t have anything to say to that. Sally found him hard to look at, so she didn’t.

“Well,” she had said, a slow drawl, “there’s still time.”

Henry cracked a smile.

“That’s not funny,” Bobby had said, and, no, it really wasn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That first night back in Rye, Sally’s friend Valerie picks her up and they drive out to the Lake Club. There’s a small group of people out by the clubhouse on the links; Sally drapes a sweater over her bare shoulders, the manicured blades of grass cool against her bare legs. They pass around a cheap bottle of gin, just as they had always done, every summer since Sally turned sixteen. Sally doesn’t know if she can even call Valerie a friend or if it’s merely a mutually needy relationship forged out of proximity and popularity. But Sally drinks, she watches, she does not say a word. There is something dull about these people, something dulled.

The thing about her future, Sally used to think, was that everything would be exciting. For example, the brightest promise of college had been the allure of freedom via far more lax dorm rules. They all liked to joke about girls from schools like Miss Porter’s – how they go wild once they realize they can spread their legs without punitive damage. Sally met Patty and on weekends they’d take the train into the city. Patty knew all the places worth going, the dingy bars, the loud clubs, the overcrowded apartment parties in the Village. Patty liked trouble, she liked danger, she liked sex: a mismanagement of emerging feminist theory had led to a pattern of cavalier bed-hopping, what Patty called “Fucking in the Name of Gloria.” Patty liked cocaine too and she liked the men who were willing to give it to her for free. “All girls,” she whispered to Sally, “want a man who gives us what we want for free.”

It was exciting, until it wasn’t. Until Sally realized “free” was just another mismanaged concept that resulted in someone getting fucked, figuratively or literally. 

Back at school, there were small hall parties constituted of little more than warm beer, mediocre weed, and tired, faux-intellectual discussions of Margaret Mead and _Tropic of Cancer,_ James Joyce’s love letters, abortion clinics and Sigmund fucking Freud – sex merely a topic of conversation, something no one was actually having.

It wasn’t all that different from the Lake Club.

“Did you know Theo was balling Heidi?” Valerie says, the edge of horror to her voice the only thing making her interesting. Sally rolls her neck, finishes her beer, brushes grass off her knees. She doesn’t know Theo and she doesn’t know Heidi, but she thinks she’s very, very happy for the both of them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally is hungover the next morning. Bobby has her old job as a lifeguard at the pool. He smirks at her over his bowl of cereal.

“I’m so bored,” she says. Bobby shovels a spoon into his mouth and doesn’t say anything, only chews. She’s been home a day.

It’s going to be a long summer, she thinks. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally meets Honor Gable two nights later. 

Honor Gable, she learns, is a descendant of one of the founding members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She’s in her early forties and nothing like Betty. She has dark hair and a severe jawline but kind eyes. She is tall and angular, sharp-looking, with a wide mouth. She looks like the sort of woman whose darkest secret is that she cries to Roberta Flack records while at home alone. There’s no edge to a woman like that. Lately, all Sally feels is edge, like a hastily cut paper doll, all ragged corners and unclean lines.

Honor makes a nice match to Henry’s own faux-patrician looks though, the thin lips, the strong nose, the neat hair. Like some upper-crust East Coast political take on that American Gothic painting.

“That’s new,” Sally says to Bobby, eyeing the woman across the room. “You didn’t tell me Henry was,” and she doesn’t finish the thought.

Bobby rolls his eyes. “She thinks she’s so interesting.”

When Grandma Pauline arrives, she gives Sally a deliberate once-over. “You look skinny,” she says. “And tired.”

“She’s been studying,” Bobby mocks. Sally gives him the finger behind Grandma Pauline’s back and he snickers. 

Henry introduces Sally to Honor before they sit for dinner, the three of them standing in the doorway, between rooms. His voice is as it always is, carrying with it that indignant breed of authority, when he says: “Sally, I’d like you to meet Honor Gable. Honor, this is Sally.” 

“Charmed,” Sally says through bared teeth. She does not offer her hand; she pushes between both Henry and Honor, her shoulder bumping against Henry’s chest, as she steps past them into the dining room.  

Sally watches Honor take a seat at the table. She doesn’t trust this woman, suspicious for no real reason other than – well, she doesn’t belong here. Sunday dinners were always the four of them and Grandma Pauline. This woman, with her brittle looking hands, nails painted shiny red, her nervous mouth to match, doesn’t belong here. 

Honor unfolds her napkin and places it in her lap. She says, “So, Sally, tell me: do you have many beaux?”

Sally raises her eyebrows, mouths the word _beaux_ , and beside her, at the head of the table, Henry narrows his eyes. She puts her fork down. “Not at present,” she says slowly. She reaches for her glass of wine. “Why? You know of any?” She takes a sip of her wine, smacks her lips. “The richer the better,” she says in a stage whisper. “Especially if they’re almost six feet under.” 

Honor laughs, false and unsure. “You’re such a beautiful girl,” she says, but she’s still laughing which only makes the compliment play like a joke. Sally can’t read the expression on Henry’s face. 

“Sally, really. Be a lady,” Grandma Pauline says. Sally smiles at her; despite herself, Grandma Pauline offers a smile in return. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally sits on the front porch of the house. It’s dark out there, only one of the porch lights lit, gnats swarming it. 

The front door creaks open and Sally lifts her head. It’s Henry, his profile in silhouette. She had heard a car start in the drive awhile ago – Honor, she had assumed.

“You disappeared after dinner,” he says. The front door closes behind him. 

She shrugs. There’s nothing to say to that. He doesn’t press it. He’s watching the street out in front of the house but there’s nothing worth seeing. 

“I’m not stupid, you know,” she finally says to Henry. He’s still standing over her, Sally sitting. He shoves his hands in his pockets, half his face caught in shadow. 

“I know you’re not stupid.” He turns to face her, full-on. “Who said you’re stupid?”

Sally has a glass of lemonade balanced on her bent knee. The condensation is cool against her skin, a trickle of water slicks down her thigh. 

“A single male politician, not a great look, huh? You were widowed though, you’d think that’d carry some weight.”

It’s like watching a shade draw over his face, the way his mouth goes grim.

“I like Honor,” he says, but he says it defensively. It’s almost as if he’s convincing himself by accusing hercynical. How interesting. How sad.

God, he must be so fucking lonely. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what happened: after Betty died, Henry felt like the only person she had. They established a routine: he’d come home from work, Sally would be in the kitchen with their housekeeper Loretta and Betty would be resting. Sally did her schoolwork from home, like a secretarial correspondence course. It made Betty furious, and with Betty furious, it almost felt like things were normal. 

After Betty died, Henry made her go back to Miss Porter’s – “she’d want you to live your life,” that had been what he had said. He said she didn’t belong here, and she had hated him for that. 

But she went back to Miss Porter’s and then she went to Sarah Lawrence and they built themselves a new routine. She would call to talk to Bobby and Gene, and after she would talk to Henry. She wondered if she was the only person he had, too. She got that sense sometimes, the way he’d talk, like they were speaking the language of conspiracies and secrets no matter how banal the subject. They never talked about Betty. They only talked about Don when they needed to. 

They’d talk about school. Sally is majoring in English lit. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life, but she figures treading water with books she’d read anyway isn’t the worst idea. 

Henry wants her to study political science. He’s not above busting out whatever manipulative tactics he might have previously employed on Rockefeller or Lindsay or the State Senate.

“You’re a smart girl,” he said to her. Sally tucked the phone under her chin and leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. She wondered how much of politics was little more than a game of exchanged compliments. She’d have to ask him sometime.

“Too smart for Emma Bovary?” 

He almost laughed, she could hear it. “Hopefully.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty got sick and when she died, so did Henry’s political ambitions.  

Henry removed himself from the public spotlight. He finished out his term in the New York State Senate and retreated to the background. He ran a few campaigns, advised a few guys with front page names, made a reputation for himself as some kind of rainmaker for the party. He had distanced himself from Mayor Lindsay before his disastrous presidential bid in ’72.

He said, in 1972, “I’ve got no stomach for it.”

He said, later that year, “I like making the decisions, but I don’t wanna be the face.”

Sally figures it’s a demotion to go from politician to backroom operator but it's a good look for him. He’s good at pulling strings.  

He said, “Lindsay knew how to fill empty promises with hot air – you learn what not to do.”

Which is how Sally winds up volunteering at the campaign office for Clark Monroe, a Republican congressional hopeful Henry is advising. 

Henry had spent only one week bugging her about getting a job; after that, the campaign gig was plunked down in front of her. “Why not,” she had said.

Sally doesn’t do much at work beyond licking envelopes, answering calls, transferring calls, often dropping these calls, stapling info packets, and making out with the candidate’s law school student son Eddie in the parking lot. 

He’s a tall boy who she found attractive until she starts seeing him up close, her mouth to his mouth. Freckles spill across his nose and along his cheeks like a spilled pepper shaker and he never stands up straight and his mouth is wide, like a duck’s. She kisses him all the same, after work and after hours, and he kisses her in return, his body pressing her body to the side of his dusty car, hers demanding more than he knows how to give.

Henry catches Sally and Eddie one evening. She kisses Eddie and Eddie kisses her and she wants him to make her feel something, make this real, but his reach isn’t far or deep enough, the two of them going through the motions, and then: lights. 

And then: Henry’s car.  

Sally’s mouth tips up in an ugly grin as she pulls back from Eddie. She brushes her hair out of her face, errant strands sticking to her wet lips. She turns to face Henry’s car. Eddie has unbuttoned the front of her shirtdress, the lace trim of her white bra visible, the dip of her breasts illuminated in the headlights. Her fingers are clumsy with the tiny buttons, her heart finally racing. She can’t see anything past the headlights, but she knows he’s there.

“Get in the car, Sally.”

She steadies her breath. She gets in the car. 

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” she says as he drives. As she readjusts her dress; she had buttoned it wrong and the fabric gapes open. Henry’s jaw is tight and his eyes watch the road.  

She wants to know what he looked like when he saw her. It’s important – she should have seen his face.

“I never said you were.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The year after Betty passed, Uncle William and Aunt Judy would visit often. They’d bring their girls. The girls didn’t like Sally even though, or perhaps because, they were cousins.  

The feeling was mutual. Sally found these girls had nothing much to offer her. 

That summer they had been preoccupied with the prospect, or the possibility, of male anatomy. They had hissed at Sally (not in unison, though one cousin was worth the other): can you even imagine? Sally could. In fact, imagination was hardly necessary. She told them in lurid detail about jacking Dennis Hobbes off behind the movie theater after they saw _The Andromeda Strain._ She told them about his pink dick, how you have to do a little more than squeeze if you want an interesting reaction from a guy, how it doesn’t take long if you know what you’re doing. How it doesn’t take much of anything from you at all but everything, it would seem, from them.  

At the end of the weekend, Sally overheard Uncle William lecturing Henry in the kitchen about how loose Betty’s daughter had become, scandalizing his daughters with talk of her filth. Henry, in a voice steady and patient, said he’d talk to her.

He never did. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some nights, when she can’t sleep, she touches herself. 

When she was younger, it had felt like an act of rebellion. Now, it’s little more than an exercise in idleness, a stopgap measure. 

She’s bored, restless, feels like there’s a point she’s missing. On those late muggy nights in that bedroom that no longer feels like her own, she slips a hand in her underwear. It takes too long to make herself come and she gets bored, bored of being bored.

On the nights she does manage to come, it’s like a low tide rolling in, a feeling that barely washes over her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Grandma Pauline visits, she makes them eat in the dining room. It’s stifling hot in there and Sally is at war with a hangover, her mouth still juniper-sticky and gag-inducing. She leaves her elbows on the table even after Grandma Pauline tells her it’s not polite.

“I’m not hungry,” Sally says and she leaves her plate bare. She knows: she’ll have to sit there through dinner all the same, sweating. 

“Fine,” Grandma Pauline snaps, passes the bowl of green beans to her anyway. Sally quickly hands it off to Gene. 

Sally watches the butter melt on its plate, the knife sinking into it. 

“Why doesn’t Sally have to eat?” Bobby asks.

“Sally is an adult.”

Bobby’s scowl grows. “So she can do whatever she wants?”

“So she has to live with the consequences of her actions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a party that night; Patty comes by the house to pick Sally up. 

Loretta lets her in, and Sally finds Patty in the front hall with her hands on her hips. “I should’ve assumed you’d have a maid for the mansion, Draper,” she says. 

A biting response is inching its way up Sally’s throat when Henry enters the hall. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm, that perpetual look of harried harassment to him. Sally had heard him on the phone earlier, each word out of his mouth a clipped _no_ , except for when he spat out, _if you think that’s gonna get you the results you want, then I got a fucking bridge to sell you_. 

Sally watches Patty study Henry, something she refuses to name tightening within her. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” Patty says, body posed, back curved, hips out. Either Henry doesn’t notice or he’s playing dumb.

He looks at Sally alone when he says, “Have fun, girls,” as if there’s something else he’d rather say. 

“I didn’t expect that,” Patty says as they get in the car, oddly thoughtful. 

“Expect what?” The leather seat of the car is too hot against her bare thighs and she fidgets. 

Patty arches an eyebrow. “That you live with that.” She lights a cigarette. “I’d have fucked him by now,” she says, shrugs.

Sally scowls. “Jesus, stop.” 

Sally is silent the entire ride into the city, Donna and Maria in the backseat supplying the chorus to Patty’s one-sided conversation (Patty thinks this, and she knows that, and she wants this, and you should agree; _I’d have fucked him by now_ , she said). 

At the party Sally incites her friends to fight. Why not. She likes to pull strings, too. She parrots Henry from earlier. She tells Maria that she saw Patty making time with Craig, the boy Maria loves because, she said, he wants to work for NASA. Maria has big wet eyes, either from the drink or the smoke or her continuing state of worry, from looking up at the stars and imagining Craig among them. “Patty’s my friend,” Maria says to Sally.

Sally smiles without heart. “If you think they were talking about you, if you think she has your best interests in mind, I got a fucking bridge to sell you.”

Not long after Maria’s wet eyes threaten to overflow and she refuses to speak to Patty. Patty in turn rips into Maria, and Donna, uninvolved and unloved, is in tears. How expected. How utterly expected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Republican Fourth of July ball coincides that summer with Honor Gable’s annual family summit to the Cape.  

“Of all the selfish, rotten timing,” Grandma Pauline kept repeating. It was her refrain as she bemoaned the now empty seat at a fancy table, the empty place at Henry’s arm. She would go, Grandma Pauline said, but her rheumatism, and the heat, and surely there’d be young, refined gentlemen there interested in a girl like Sally. 

Sally felt foolish for not having seen that coming sooner. 

(To her credit and never-ending amusement, Grandma Pauline seemed to regret the decision just as much as Sally when she saw the Halston gown Sally bought at Neiman’s. “You might as well go nude,” she said, fingering the light fabric, eyeing the halter neckline, the low back, with distaste. 

“There’s an idea,” Sally teased, and Grandma Pauline had walked away, a distant, “Why do I even bother?” asked of no one.)

“Don’t tell me Tricia Nixon is gracing us with her presence.”

Sally’s eyes widen at the woman clutching her arm. “What?”

“Darling,” the woman says. She swats Sally with her gloved hand. “It’s a compliment.”

Sally hates this party and she hates these people. The women are all encrusted in flashy armor of inherited jewels and chiffon, expensive overripe perfume and Aqua Net. The men all appear to be dressed for their own funerals. 

She decides there is only one solution and that is to work her way to drunk. She reaches for another drink but a hand closes around hers. Henry’s, of course. 

“I’d prefer you keep your wits about you.”

“For the murder mystery portion of the evening, right?” she says, her tone droll.

He ignores her. “Or at the least the appearance of your sobriety.”

She does the same. “Hard to tell who the corpse-in-the-making might be. Half these guys have gotta be past death’s doorstep, waiting in the foyer.”

“Sally.”

His hand is still wrapped around her hand and the sweating glass. What if she dropped it. She looks up at him. 

“You didn’t have to come,” he says. Her mouth starts to twist in a sneer and she bites down on the words, _I’m doing you a favor_. 

Instead, she shrugs, lets the sneer morph into an ugly smile. “I wanted shrimp cocktail.”

She doesn’t get shrimp cocktail. She is seated next to Happy Rockefeller during the dinner and Henry’s busy making nice with Rocky. Everyone else at the table largely ignores her, and that’s fine by her. It’s more than fine – it’s welcome. 

She has no idea how welcome it is until after the dinner. Sally has barricaded herself in an ornate restroom stall – stopped only once en route: “has anyone told you you look an awful lot like Tricia Nixon?” – contemplating various escape routes – she could steal the car, she could steal a man, she could mount a bloody murder-suicide campaign – when she hears them. 

“Did you see what Henry Francis brought?” the woman at the mirror asks. Sally frowns.

“His _enfant terrible_?” They laugh. 

“His wife’s body’s still warm, for Christ’s sake – ”

“ – though not as hot as that little prom queen, huh.” They laugh harder, and Sally’s eyes widen. They think she’s with Henry. 

“When this one croaks – ”

“ – Quaaludes,” a third woman interrupts with a drunken laugh, “it’ll be Quaaludes – ”

“ – he’ll have to hit up an elementary school to find Wife Number Four.”

They think Henry’s fucking her. 

“I guess a girl can get away with a dress like that when she doesn’t have any breasts.” Sally looks down, draws a straight line down her sternum, anger growing. 

“You don’t think she’s,” one woman says, and through the crack in the door Sally can see her gesture at her stomach, pantomiming a pregnant belly. Sally smoothes her dress over her flat stomach, oddly the most indignant about that single comment.

“Here’s hoping Happy gave the girl some tips,” one says; “Here’s hoping Mr. Francis leaves a tip on the nightstand,” another crows. 

Sally emerges from the stall, too forceful with the door and it smacks against the wall. She doesn’t look at any of them. She takes a tube of lipstick from her clutch and uncaps it, elbows her way to the mirror. She can feel their eyes on her and she studiously ignores them as she swipes the waxy color on her mouth. She doesn’t say a word. She smacks her lips and adjusts the bust of her dress, pushing her tits together. 

The women don’t speak until she’s at the door.

“Don’t you think she looks a bit like whatshername? Nixon’s daughter?”

“That went well,” Henry says in the car. She had lost track of him after the dinner; he worked the room and she worked glass after glass of champagne.

“They thought I was your date,” she says after a beat. 

“You were.”

“No, they thought I was your date.”

“No they didn’t.”

“Yes they did, I heard them.”

“What? What’d they say? Who is they?”

“They. People. And it doesn’t matter.”

“Then why tell me?”

Because I want you to feel uncomfortable too, she doesn’t say. I want you to picture it, too. I can’t stop picturing it, she doesn’t say.

“I don’t know,” she says instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything Sally could think to do that summer she has already done.

It’s not that she thinks she’s experienced it all, but rather that nothing reaches her. She does Dexedrine in the bathroom at a party Patty drags her to and all it does is make her anxious. Anxious that time will run out, that she will run out, that there’s nothing in this world worth doing, nothing better than Dexedrine in a stranger’s bathroom and that’s nothing very good at all. 

It rains that night and the Dexedrine keeps her awake and in bed, when she peels her underwear down her legs, she thinks: Henry. Her breath goes sharp and she bites her bottom lip. She can’t stop thinking it – his mouth downturned and disapproving, his hands spread on her body, his body on hers – and she rolls over, rides her hand – his voice in her ear, dark and demanding, telling her what he’s going to do to her what he’s going to make her want – and she comes hard, her mouth muffled against the pillow.  

She can’t stop picturing it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You just getting in?”

Sally freezes. The bottle of orange juice is still held to her mouth, the open door of the fridge hiding her from view. She swipes at her mouth with the back of her hand, shuts the door.

Henry has his robe on, his hair messy like he’s been sleeping. He has an empty glass in his hand so she guesses probably not sleeping, not yet. 

“What’s it look like?”

His brows knit, a look of quiet confusion on his face. He looks at her more and more like that lately, as if there’s a riddle or, worse, a punchline waiting like an open manhole for him to fall into. He looks at her like she’s a trap, and maybe that is what she is. Maybe she’s been laid open for a long time now and is desperate to snap closed around someone. 

She takes a step towards him. She’s still thirsty. She thinks she might still be drunk.

Henry swallows and there’s something fundamentally interesting about his face right now, but she can’t put her finger on it. She thinks it might be that he wants to be trapped. 

But Henry is right there, and it’s the most obvious thing in the world for her to kiss him hello. So she does: she kisses him quickly, chastely, on the lips, rising up on tiptoes to meet his mouth – his own lips pursed and unyielding, hers tacky with borrowed lipstick, bright and acidic from the juice. She applies the smallest pressure of tongue against the swell of his bottom lip when she pulls away. She can taste a hint of scotch, his mouth, himself, a curiosity to her. 

It’s all worth it for the startled, almost hurt look on his face.

“Sally,” he says in that injurious tone designed to match his face, as if he meant to ask her _why?_

Sally almost laughs. It’s not that she wants trouble. It’s not that she only wants trouble. It’s just that she has something dangerous licking up inside of her, hot and fickle. It’s just that she wants things to happen. 

It’s just, she thinks, that she wants. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why not. Why the hell not. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally had sex for the first time before she went to college and before she went to Madrid. It happened the way she had thought these things were meant to happen: in the heat of summer, on a blanket that smelled of dead grass in the back of a car with a boy with big clumsy hands and a well-meaning mouth. The boy’s name was Robert and she knew him through a friend of a friend. It didn’t last long, both the sex and the knowing of Robert; the only thing she had felt was first a minor discomfort and then an overwhelming disappointment. 

She lost her virginity at the age of seventeen. Lost, she still thinks, is a poor word to employ for something you willingly gave away. 

It's not even really giving something away though. Nothing was ceded, nothing for him to claim as his own. If anything, she had merely altered a part of herself, like a haircut or a growth spurt. Nothing lost. Nothing really gained, either. 

She had felt dumb after. She was sore between her legs and she didn’t tell the other girls until after Sally and Robert ended their unofficial union and she didn’t even want to say his name.She wanted someone to tell her how terrible and bad and wrong she was. She wanted her mother. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry moved out of the bedroom he shared with Betty after she died. 

Bobby reported it to Sally over the phone one day, full of dark dread and import: “Henry doesn’t sleep in their room anymore.” 

“Is that so,” Sally had said. 

“What do you think that means?” 

“I think it means that Betty is still dead,” Sally said, crueler than she needed to be. She wound the phone cord around her finger and sighed heavily, hoping Bobby knew to take that as an apology. 

Henry sleeps in the former guest room now, the room previously unused and still done up in forbidding dark hunting plaids and mournful greens from the former owners. 

Sally knocks her fist against the door as she pushes it open. The surprise is evident on Henry’s face. He is sitting in bed. He closes the book in his hands, his expression off-guard and open. He is looking at her the same way he had when she had kissed him in the kitchen – like he does not know her the way he thought he did. 

He does though. Or, she thinks, he should know better. This isn’t the first time she’s done this.

She could count on one hand the number of times she’s done this – four. This makes five. It was always innocent, it had to be, because the only thing she had wanted was to share her loneliness with someone else. 

“I don’t think – ” Henry starts, and that’s new. The first time she’d done this – at Christmas, not the first Christmas without Betty but the second – she had snapped, “Don’t say anything,” as she slid under the covers, before he could say anything. 

Now though, she doesn’t interrupt him. She doesn’t need to: he lets the idea hang unfinished. 

“It’s cooler in here,” she says, which isn’t entirely true. The night is overly warm and the house is too big, the heat spreads. 

She gets in bed and he watches her, wary. He turns off the lamp after an unspoken moment of deliberation, the two of the laying side-by-side, a clean division of mattress between them. 

The very first time, two Christmases ago, she had been sad and she got into his bed, rolled on her side away from him and slept there. She had cried for awhile and he didn’t touch her and he didn’t say anything and she had appreciated that. There was nothing regular or routine about it; it was just that some nights being alone was too much to bear and his bed was there and he was in it and in a way she had come to think they both belonged to one another. That first night, the sheets were warm and they smelled of him, and that had been enough.

Sally wakes before the sun has risen, his room still dark. Henry is pressed against her back, and that’s new too. His body is wrapped around hers, hot and oppressive. She doesn’t move, he doesn’t move, his breathing is even and deep. His hand is clutched around her waist and the warm weight of him presses her into the mattress. Sally finds it hard to breathe; she can feel his breath at the back of her neck. 

She disentangles herself carefully, crawls out of his bed, damp with sweat. Everything about him is familiar and known, save for the feel of his body against hers.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the front porch, Sally lights a cigarette.

“Put that out. Jesus,” Henry says.

“Why not,” she drawls. She stubs it out in an empty bottle of Coke all the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two weeks later Bobby and Gene go to visit Uncle William for the weekend. Sally stays behind, because, she says, of the campaign.

“You don’t even do anything there,” Bobby says. 

But she stays and Eddie takes her out for ice cream, they go to see _Chinatown_ , and she kisses him only once in the parking lot. 

It’s not even midnight when she wanders into the house. There’s a noise from down the hall and she seeks it out, trailing her hand down the wall as she goes. She can see light from Henry’s study, the door half open. 

She freezes in the doorway. She doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t make a sound. She stares straight ahead.

Honor Gable, Honor fucking Gable of the Daughters of the Fucking American Revolution is on her knees in front of Henry. 

Sally lifts her eyes from the back of Honor’s head only to meet Henry’s eye. She can hear him suck in a breath. She can’t look away

Honor’s head bobs and he doesn’t tell her to stop – he doesn’t stop anyone, not Honor, on her knees like her title of a name has been revoked, and not Sally. Not himself. His eyes are dark as they fix on her; it makes her want to squeeze her thighs together. 

It’s funny: Sally never thought of Henry as a person until Betty got sick. Then, it became painfully obvious to her. He was a person and a man and he wanted things and lost things and he belonged to himself just as much as he belonged to Betty and this family.

Henry bucks up into her mouth and Honor makes a muffled noise of surprise and Sally can just barely see the base of his cock when Honor moves her hand. Henry clutches the arms of the couch and then her hair, mostly silent save for the loud way he’s breathing, almost panting. The loudest thing in the room is Honor’s wet mouth as he fucks it and the thudding of Sally’s heart as she watches.  

When he comes he’s looking at Sally, never breaking eye contact, his hand buried in Honor’s hair, holding her in place, his mouth open, the only sound he makes a quiet, involuntary groan. 

That night, Sally goes to sleep, curled on her side, the heel of her hand pressed between her legs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The girls were sprawled across their dorm room. It was senior year, Miss Porter’s, just before graduation. It was late at night and Sally was in bed, eating a cow tail, caramel sticking to her teeth, a book open in her lap. The girls from down the hall were laid out, curiously elegant, on the floor between the two twin beds, Sally’s roommate Angela sharing her bed with Beatriz.

Sally had been only halfway engaged in the conversation; she heard one girl say: “My father says all politicians are perverts.”

Beatriz cocked her head. “Isn’t your dad a politician, Sally?” Her voice was more sugary-sweet than the candy in Sally’s mouth. 

“Stepdad,” she said without looking up. She turned the page.

“Is he a pervert?” Beatriz asked, theatrically lascivious.

Sally arched an eyebrow, offered her a sidelong glance. “Not to my carnal knowledge.” 

“I heard he was alone in your room that one time – waiting,” Beatriz teased. 

Sally put the book down, looked at Beatriz dead-on. Angela looked up at the ceiling, anywhere but Sally. 

“Busted,” Sally said. “Do you want me to tell you what his cock tasted like?” Her voice was mean and flat, uninterested, and never more like her mother’s. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning breaks hot and hazy, the sort of weather that would have made Sylvia Plath think of the Rosenbergs. 

In the kitchen, Sally lounges against the counter, still in her nightshirt, waiting for the toaster to ding.  

When Henry enters he is dressed for work, his jacket slung over his arm. He looks at her and neither of them say anything. She watches him watch her, watches him look to her bare legs, as if he is allowing himself this one small concession. She wonders if that’s how all truly bad decisions and truly bad actions come to pass: they started with a small allowance, the quiet, internal rationalization that just this once, this isn’t so bad. He looks at her legs. She bites the inside of her cheek. She pictures his hand caught in Honor’s hair. 

The toaster dings, Henry pours his coffee, and neither of them speaks. Sally does not say a word until he gathers his jacket to leave.

“I have to admit, I had no idea former debutantes performed such acts.” Her mouth twists as she looks up at him from the kitchen table. “Though I suppose, once past your prime you need at least one marketable skill.”

“Are you done?”

Her face softens into a more genuine, less barbed smile. “Are you?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally came back from Spain, bare long legs and tangled straight blonde hair that hung down to her chest, lightened by the sun. Felt as if her mouth had been permanently stained deep red. Worn like her own personal scarlet A – her wide mouth bright, if only to her own eye. She had told herself when the flight left New York, headed for Madrid, she would do everything Betty would not. So she drank cheap red wine straight from the bottle, she bought cheap leather sandals at an outdoor market and let her feet go dusty and flat, the sandals smacking against the stone streets. She slept in an overcrowded train car en route to Paris one weekend, curled in the luggage rack with the suitcases, her own coat draped around her, a silent man perched beside her who noisily ate an apple and then offered her the apple core as if she might want it. She chain-smoked as she wandered Montmartre. She lost her friends while in Brussels and not once did she panic but instead drank a beer in an outdoor cafe, across the street from a cathedral crowded with tourists.She eventually found them in a crowd of visiting Greek students, the language barrier overcome via copious amounts of shared alcohol and ever-widening gestures. She had sex with one of them, only to her, she could not believe that this act – sweaty hands and a sweaty mouth and hips jarring against hers, jostling her like there was a prize to be let loose from deep within her, the entire exchange less than ten minutes of her time – was considered sex. The only thrill to be found came outside their bodies: that this was a thing she should not be doing, but here she was – doing it. Angela called her a slut and they laughed and they laughed and Sally thought that was better than the sex itself. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally lets Eddie put his fingers inside of her, his mouth on her mouth, and it’s nothing, she thinks. Nothing, nothing, nothing, she thinks, she feels, she didn’t know she was saying it out loud until Eddie says, “What?” and she sighs – she feels raw inside but she doesn’t come: “Nothing.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally saw a shrink for only a month after Betty died. The doctor asked her if she missed her mother and she decided this man was too stupid to help her – that there was nowhere he could take her grief because he couldn’t even see it.

He had a lot of things to say about grief though. Like alchemy, he had told her – she would change the grief within her into something else. Something golden and worth having. The secret there, he said, was time.

Time, he said. Time. Didn’t he know she was tired of mourning. Didn’t he know she was tired of waiting for things to happen to her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a list of things Sally does not believe in: patience, astrology, redemption or regret.

Late in the evening, Sally approaches Henry in his study – the scene of the crime, as she has come to think of it. Henry is sitting in the same armchair as that night and looks at her over his newspaper. She shuts the door behind her and leans back against it. 

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Sally crosses her arms over her chest and crosses the room to stand before him. 

“Do you know how boring this summer has been?”

Henry sighs loudly as he folds the newspaper. The other day Donna had read Sally her monthly horoscope from a magazine. You hold the reins, it said. Someone is waiting for you to do something they are too afraid to do. 

“That’s highly specific,” Sally had said. 

“‘Throw off all your concerns or worries – there is no need to hide your true desires,’” Donna continued. 

Sally does not believe in astrology but she does believe in making things happen. She will do as she wants. 

“What are you doing?” he asks again, wariness filtering into his voice. Her knee bumps against his and he eyes her carefully now.  

“I’ve thought of you,” she tells him, slight confusion marring his face. “But it wasn’t enough.” Sally has never been good with flirting, never been good with a come-on, and when she says it, it sounds far more genuine, sincere and sad, than she wanted. She fears she’s blushing, finds it doesn’t matter as Henry scrubs a hand over his face, into his hair, mussing it.  

“Jesus, Sally,” he says, more to himself than to her. 

You will get the satisfaction just getting something going, Donna read.

She moves closer and he doesn’t stop her. He’s close, he’s there, and he’s waiting. Nerves thrum through her, and it is decided, she thinks. It’s not exactly courage, but then foolishness has always been a stubborn embarrassment of a cousin to bravery. Standing over him, Sally takes his hand and she pulls it under her skirt. She can feel his fingers at the edge of her panties, his knuckles brushing her inner thigh, and her breath catches.

“Sally, no,” he says, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. She can feel his fingers twitch, wanting to touch. “You don’t want this,” he says.

He doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t know what she wants. That, she thinks, giddy almost, they have in common. 

“You do.” She says it quietly, and she had expected guilt or shame, but instead his face closes off in anger. He lifts his eyes to her and she stares back at him. He is rationalizing this, she thinks. He is telling himself: this isn’t so bad. 

Henry is tentative at first, his breathing deep and even, like he doesn’t know if he’s more afraid of her or himself. His fingers push experimentally against damp cotton and the only tell from him is the tic at the corner of his jaw. She swallows, hard. He watches her, critical and careful, as he presses further, both of them maintaining eye contact, her pulse hammering, mouth parting open. Slowly, so slowly, giving her more than enough opportunity to change her mind (she’s not going to change her mind), time he has afforded himself to do the right thing and walk away (he’s not going to walk away), he curls his fingers into the edge of her panties and peels them to the side. She shivers. 

“Is this what you wanted?” he asks, his voice steady. She doesn’t answer him. He thinks he knows everything. He brushes the bent knuckle of his index finger against her, his touch too light to part her to him. Sally grips the arms of the chair and moves closer, her hair falling in her face and his. He pushes two fingers against, but not inside her. She whimpers, rolls her hips forward; he makes a cut-off sound deep in his throat as he moves his fingers again against her, through the slick.

She sinks into the chair as his fingers sink into her, her knees on either side of him, the angle wrong, but she’s panting anyway. He twists his hand and a snarled and profane version of his name leaves her mouth, her head dipping down to his shoulder. Patty once told her not to be noisy about it, not to let them think they’re doing you any favors: first they’ll go smug and then they’ll go lazy. Sally doesn’t know what kind of advice that is, but she disregards it completely. 

Because the thing is, Sally finally gets it: Henry’s fingers inside her, his face right there, her arms wrapped tight around him – this is what sex is supposed to feel like. Impossible and terrible and like someone has found a way to reach inside you, found a way to wring you out, make you feel every something you though everyone had lied to you about existing. He must feel it too – he’s breathing so loud. She can feel it on her face, her neck. Sally brings her hand to his mouth. She smoothes her fingers over first his lips and then inside, wet and hot, and he sighs, she grinds into his hand, wanting more.

A first warning clench around his fingers, and Henry, as though drugged, says, “That’s it,” low and dirty, and she clenches again. His lips ghost along her neck, and that’s good, that’s better than looking at him; more pressure of his mouth, tongue, edge of teeth, lips, the push of his fingers inside her, his thumb rubbing, she can’t look at him – she comes with an incredulous gasp, his hand at the small of her back dipping down to squeeze her ass, to push her onto his hand, closer to him. 

After, he looks ashamed, his fingers wet. He wipes them on his trousers. Sally, still in his lap, reaches between them to press her hand against his cock over his trousers. He stops her. “Don’t,” he says, and “Don’t?” she repeats, but her hand is still there and his hand is still wrapped tight around her wrist and neither of them are moving. She can feel the heat of him through the fabric, she wants more of that, and “Don’t,” he finally says, one more time, voice so soft and quiet, the closest she’s ever heard him to begging. 

She lets him guide her hand away. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grandma Pauline likes to say, “You take after your father,” which Sally knows is just another way of saying: you’ve got the devil in you. She doesn’t think she’s wrong.

Here is what Sally believes: sometimes you have to do the wrong things just to see what you can get away with – just to know what out there is even worth wanting.  

You learn, he had said, what not to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally kept the photo Betty left her, of Betty and Henry at the 1968 Republican Gala. In the photograph neither Betty nor Henry looked like anyone Sally had ever known in her life. They were strangers, caught in the glare of the camera’s flash, recorded in history as foreigners to Sally’s life.  

She kept it. She never knew what it was she was trying to remind herself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The summer carries on, uneventful. It bleeds into August, the heat merciless. Sally lives on a diet of melting popsicles and vodka-spiked lemonade.

The summer carries on, time marches forward (time never stops, it’s pitiless) and it’s too easy to convince herself that night in his study never even happened, only sometimes. Well, sometimes. Sometimes Henry meets her eye and sometimes he can’t. Sometimes she watches the way his jaw goes tight and clenched when he is looking at her or refusing to look at her. There are a lot of sometimes that have come to fill this stretch of summer. 

Sally is at the sink, washing dishes. The house is empty and quiet, Bobby out playing baseball and Gene down at the drive-in with the neighbor kid and his family. She hears Henry’s arrival – the familiar cadence of his footsteps – before she sees him. She glances over her shoulder – Henry, his shirtsleeves rolled, tie and collar loosened – and then immediately turns back to the dishes, silverware clanking against the submerged plates.  

“You can leave those for Loretta,” he says. “She’ll be by in the morning.”

“It’s fine,” Sally says. “You eat?”

“Yeah,” he says, but he sounds distracted. He crosses his arms over his chest, sways back a little, as if to create distance between them, or at the least, the illusion of it. 

That is another something: Sally and Henry are rarely alone now. It is like they no longer know how to behave with one another when no one else is in the room with them.

“You can stop avoiding me, you know,” she says, but she says it to the dirty dishwater in the sink.  

She hears him sigh behind her and she turns around. Sally peels the gloves off, her hands pruned and rubbery smelling, and Henry yanks his tie clear of his collar, drops it to the table. He has adopted that politician’s posture, like if he plays his cards right he can sell her on his position.  

She knows Henry feels guilty about all of this, and Sally knows that she should feel guilty, but it makes her curious, how that part is missing for her.

So she says, “I came to you,” and hopes he knows that means he is absolved.

“I know.” The corner of his mouth quirks up as if he might smile, his hands in his pockets like he doesn’t trust himself. “I was there.”

Henry takes a step towards her, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“I talked to Clark today. He says you’re still seeing his son. Eddie.” He says his name like he just learned to pronounce it.

“I am,” she says, hedging. This is interesting.

“And, what?” Henry says. He is in front of her now, close enough to touch. “The boy’s not enough for you? That what this is about?”

_The boy_. Sally tips her head, doesn’t say anything at first. He must read something in her face; she watches the dark way he eyes her mouth. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to beg? Tell you I need a man? Tell you I needed a man like you to get me wet and fuck me straight?'  

He shakes his head, almost stern. She watches his throat bob as he swallows. “Look at the mouth on you,” he finally says, a low rumble, his mouth as dirty as her own. 

She left the television on in the other room and she can hear it but she can’t make out the dialogue. What’s the point, she thinks. 

“I’m trying to be a good person,” he says softly and he says it like he means it. Like he’s been telling himself this. Like he doesn’t know if he’d rather push her away or pull her in closer. 

“How boring,” she says, and she means that, too.

She bridges the gap between them and she kisses him – aggressive and forward and everything Betty told her not to be. Henry exhales noisily. She expects him to back off, but he doesn’t. Instead, with his hands firm and clenched at his sides, he leans in and he kisses her back, exploratory and impatient, his tongue pushing against hers. 

Sally’s hands grab at his chest, his hands reaching to touch her, grasping at her as the kiss intensifies. His hand spans her hip, his grip tight, his fingers dipping under the waistband of her shorts. There is this wild desperation to him that doesn’t fit her idea of him; it makes her think of how he looks at her sometimes – as if they no longer know each other. They’re not strangers though, she thinks, her mouth open to his, open to more. 

He backs her up against the sink. The hem of her shirt and the small of her back are damp with the water she spilled over the sink’s edge and his hands are slippery when he finds that wet skin. Her own hand drifts down to his belt, toys with the buckle. 

She thinks – reciprocity. 

“Sally,” he says, a warning. She raises her head to look at him.

He makes a cut-off choking sound when she palms his cock. “Don’t do that,” he says but he gasps when he says it, sounds like he means its opposite.

“I want to,” Sally says in a small voice, her lips nearly against his. She stands up on tiptoe, her mouth now at his ear, his belt undone, her fingers now at the zipper, his stomach muscles leaping under her other hand, his breathing ragged.

She slips a hand under his boxers; his groan sounds a lot like defeat. That’s the point.

He bucks into her hand, whispers, “Oh, fuck,” his mouth at the crown of her head. 

It doesn’t take long. His voice gets rougher, thicker accent coloring his vowels, gruff. He has his eyes squeezed shut like he can’t even look at her. She understands that, but she bites him, hard, under his jaw. His eyes flash open, look at her and she looks up at him, and she doesn’t say his name, she doesn’t do that, but she kisses the bite, eyes not leaving his, and when he comes – wet and messy on her hand and on his shirt – he sounds, she thinks, like he is bargaining with either her or god.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eddie takes her out for dinner.

He likes to drop unearned legal terms into the conversation and Sally likes to tune him out. Eddie’s father – the aspiring Congressman, her boss, Henry’s puppet – knows the owner of the restaurant and he brings them a complimentary bottle of wine. “Only the finest,” he tells them, as if he is the one courting their vote. 

“That’s nice,” Sally says, unsure if it is nice or just another exchange of compliments. Just more politics.

Eddie shrugs. “It’d be negligent of him otherwise.”

Sally takes a sip of her wine, but there’s sediment at the bottom and it sticks, gritty, to her tongue. 

“That word does not mean what you think it means,” Sally says, her mouth bitter. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most days, Sally goes to work. Sally answers the phone at the campaign office, licks envelopes, pink tongue, legs bare, Eddie’s tongue, his car, her mouth, “I can’t speak to Mr. Monroe’s position on family values,” she eavesdrops on gossip in the small canteen, “ …. fucking the nanny, they say,” “the nanny, that’s rich – the girl’s a babysitter if she’s anything, an absolute child,” she strands Eddie in his car with a hard-on, tells him he has to know this isn’t going anywhere, that she’s nothing very good, not for him and not at all, the woman in the canteen hisses, “ … _fucking_ her,” Sally worries her bottom lip, her teeth on edge, they put her on a street corner, “no, you’re nothing much at all, are you,” Eddie had said to her, they give her a box of buttons,  VOTE THIS FALL VOTE THIS FALL VOTE THIS FALL VOTE – , “aren’t you a sweet girl,” Sally stares at the woman and the woman’s face falls, she looks like she may spit, she says, “gimme one of those goddamn buttons,” and Sally does.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She will be leaving Rye soon. The summer is ending.  

Henry’s bedroom is already dark when Sally comes to him. He is awake, his eyes open and the brightest point in the room. 

The two of them lay in his bed together, the room dark and quiet, the evenness of his breath satisfying to her. Without a word, she reaches across the divide between them and takes his hand in hers. His skin is hot and dry and she entwines her fingers with his. He brushes his over her hand, his thumb stroking the bend of her wrist. She rolls then, her forehead to his shoulder and she can feel his lips at her temple. 

And then: 

His hands are on her bare hipbones and she sucks in a breath, lets him open her to him. She tips her head back, looks up at the ceiling. She covers her mouth with her hand when she feels his mouth on her, her entire body arching, one heel digging into his back while the other skids over the sheet.

Sally tries to keep quiet, her forearm thrown over her mouth as she squirms, her legs threatening to close. Henry holds her down, an arm barred over her hips, his hand pulling at her shirt, her thighs shaking, she can hear his mouth as he sucks and licks at her.

When he makes her come she begs his name – “Henry, Henry, please,” – and he groans, full-bodied and into her, in reply. Her breath leaves her in great shuddering gasps and she feels as if she’s been crying.

She can taste herself on his mouth when she kisses him. He lets her – he doesn’t kiss her back but he lets her work her mouth over his. His mouth opens to her and she licks inside it.

And then:

Sally is on top of him, bent over, her chest bare and flush with his. Henry fucks up into her while she rolls her hips. He’s thick, makes her ache, and when he bares his throat to her – his head thrown back as he says the single word _yes_ , as the headboard rattles against the wall – she hides her face against it. He traces where she’s wet and stretched around him and a whine builds in the back of her throat, her head tipping back, hand balanced in the center of his chest as she rides him. 

They’re both so desperate and this is what she wanted, she thinks. The old tension has been cut from within her, replaced by a new one. 

This is what she wanted, she thinks, with Henry inside of her – something wrong enough to consume her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like alchemy, the doctor had said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty was dying. At the stove, Bobby listlessly stirred a pot of boiling pasta. 

“What’s going to happen to us when she dies?" 

Sally froze. For just a second, the way he had asked the question made the whole thing sounds so much more terrible and much more existential than he could have possibly meant. “We’ll stay here, with Henry. Or,” she said, slowly, “Mom wants us to stay with Uncle William. And then there’s Dad,” she said quietly, an afterthought.

Bobby stopped stirring. “I don’t like Uncle William.”

“No one does,” she said, noncommittally. 

Bobby had looked at her, eyes bright and frightened, his mouth tense. “What if no one wants us?”

Someone will want us, she meant to say, but the truth was she wasn’t sure she believed that. The truth was, she asked herself the same question every night. Where would they go if no one wanted them? What was going to happen to them when she died?

Sally reached and turned off the burner. 

What was going to happen to her?

“Go get Gene. It’s time for dinner.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“That can’t ever happen again.” 

Henry says it eight days after they slept together. Sally knows because Sally has been counting for no real reason other than this is something she feels she should keep track of, like those factories that keep tallies of days since an accident. Eight, they’re at eight. 

She doesn’t say anything, because there is nothing to say.  

“Sally.”

“What? It’ll never happen again.”

A pause stretches. The sun sets earlier now as summer approaches its end. Sally pulls her knees to her chest and watches the sky streak red over the roofs of the houses across the street, the porch as always blanketed in cool shade.

“You should just bite the bullet,” she says slowly, eyes still trained on the sky. “Marry Honor.” 

“That’s enough.”

“You’ve clearly left your bed empty for too long.”

“I said that’s enough.” Henry’s voice is raised. She turns to look at him seated beside her and he points at her. “You think you know everything, don’t you.”

She smiles and he doesn’t. He rests his elbows on his knees, hands hanging down limp at the wrist. “Christ, I’m so ashamed of myself,” he says quietly. He looks down and shakes his head. 

“Stop talking,” she says, meaner than she intended. His gaze shoots up sharply to meet hers. Her face gentles. She shrugs one shoulder. “This was just something that happened.”

The sun continues to set, darkness spreading down the street, so slowly, without their notice, until all the red is gone from the sky, replaced with night. 

“I’m not her, you know,” she says. 

Henry’s face falls and just as quickly reassembles itself, stony, hiding any hurt he might have felt. “You think I don’t know that?”

By the end of the summer Richard Nixon resigns the office of the president. Henry says it’s a shameful time for the Republican Party and she says all time are shameful times where that party is concerned. “Knock it off,” he says, but he says it without heart, which is what she supposes is what’s missing from a lot of things these days: the Republican Party, Richard Nixon, the end of summer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally remembers the first time that summer she crawled into bed with him. Before anything had happened between them, before she knew anything could happen. The greatest place she thinks a person can be is right there: on the brink. 

Her eyes were open and she had stared up at the ceiling. The room was dark and warm and she could feel the heat of him beside her, how rigid his body was in his own bed. 

“Aren’t you so lonely?” she heard herself ask. She can’t remember her tone. She wants to believe she had tried to tease him, play cute, but she knows that’s wrong. She knows that her voice cracked on that final offending word.

The sheets rustled. He was warm and he was near. Her eyes were wet.  

“Go to sleep, Sally,” Henry had said. That was his reply. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What are you thinking for the summer?” Henry had asked her over the phone. 

Her anger was a surprise, even to her.

“Stop asking me what I want to do,” she snapped. “Tomorrow isn’t real. It’s just – it’s a construct.” She used the language Donna had used, when they were sprawled together, sharing a blunt, under the windows in her dorm room. Donna had said, sex is a construct, family is a construct, love is a construct, and Sally had hated that. Sally hadn’t even felt high, just tired, annoyed and afraid. “All you do is kick it further down the road,” she said to Henry, but the venom was gone. “You never get there.”

“Sally.”

“I don’t even know where I’d want to go.”

“Sally,” he said again. His voice always sounded like tested patience, but there was a comfort in that. “I’m not asking you to make any major life decision. I’m asking you what you want to do with your summer.”  

She didn’t say anything. She had Kate Chopin’s _The Awakening_ open beside her. She had underlined the line: _I give myself where I choose_. She had a paper due at the end of the month. She hadn’t even started.

“Come home,” he said, suddenly, quietly, though with the same force he said anything to her. The idea was acceptable when said by him. It meant she was needed, meant he wanted her there. She felt a nearness to him she would never be able to explain to another person, not even him.  

“Okay,” she said. _I give myself where I choose._ “I could do that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally gets a ride back to school with Patty.

Her hair blows in the late summer breeze as she walks to Patty’s car. Time was pitiless: it just kept going. “Long time no see,” Patty says. “How was the rest of your summer? And please say better than mine.”

“Weird,” Sally says. “It was weird.” 

She bums a cigarette off of Patty. Patty starts the car. Roberta Flack is on the radio and she sings _like the trembling heart of a captive bird_. It’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard. Sally flicks her mother’s lighter and the flame leaps. She inhales deep. She watches the house disappear in the rearview mirror.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
